Cleaving

by Brock Marie Moore



little goat with fox's ears
  your tail a languid paintbrush
  your lashes snowflake-pale
you have shy-stepped from the tapestry
into my darkened room

cloven hooves undercrush sweet
(carpet-pile's) clover,
stamping crescent prints:
  tiny pairs of lungs
  twin slices of liver
 
and now i can smell you
  warm grass-pulp scent puffed
  from your quivering muzzle
a delicious,
most inoffensive beast-breath

(mute-mouthed and marrowless)
i beg for the surgeon's cut
of your horn



Brock Marie Moore lives in South Texas (one of the driest and hottest of the Lower Planes) with her husband, various feline pestilentials, and their dog, who has mastered several tiers of obedience and agility training and yet cannot manage to be friendly with passing strangers. (Brock herself suffers from the same disability, curiously enough.)

Her favorite fruit is that of the Prickly Pear Cactus, which must be plucked with great delicacy, arranging fingers and knife just so between the various thorns, some as vague and painful as nettle-fluff, others as long and stiff as splintered hardwood. Brock had many a great adventure prowling the wild pasturelands of her parents' ranch with a child-sized longbow and her horse, pretending to survive on these fruits, whose bland taste and core of seeds is far less impressive than the fearful fun of gathering them.

Visit Brock at her website.

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